The Ghost Pirates eBook

“And you think—?” said the Captain,
interrogatively, and stopped short.

“No,” replied Jessop. “I don’t
think. I know. None of us think_.
It’s a gospel fact. People talk
about queer things happening at sea; but this isn’t
one of them. This is one of the real things.
You’ve all seen queer things; perhaps more than
I have. It depends. But they don’t
go down in the log. These kinds of things never
do. This one won’t; at least, not as it’s
really happened.”

He nodded his head, slowly, and went on, addressing
the Captain more particularly.

“I’ll bet,” he said, deliberately,
“that you’ll enter it in the log-book,
something like this:

“’May l8th. Lat.—­S.
Long.—­W. 2 p.m. Light winds from the
South and East. Sighted a full-rigged ship on
the starboard bow. Overhauled her in the first
dog-watch. Signalled her; but received no response.
During the second dog-watch she steadily refused to
communicate. About eight bells, it was observed
that she seemed to be settling by the head, and a minute
later she foundered suddenly, bows foremost, with all
her crew. Put out a boat and picked up one of
the men, an A.B. by the name of Jessop. He was
quite unable to give any explanation of the catastrophe.’

“And you two,” he made a gesture at the
First and Second Mates, “will probably sign
your names to it, and so will I, and perhaps one of
your A.B.s. Then when we get home they’ll
print a report of it in the newspapers, and people
will talk about the unseaworthy ships. Maybe some
of the experts will talk rot about rivets and defective
plates and so forth.”

He laughed, cynically. Then he went on.

“And you know, when you come to think of it,
there’s no one except our own selves will ever
know how it happened—­really. The shellbacks
don’t count. They’re only ’beastly,
drunken brutes of common sailors’—­poor
devils! No one would think of taking anything
they said, as anything more than a damned cuffer.
Besides, the beggars only tell these things when they’re
half-boozed. They wouldn’t then (for fear
of being laughed at), only they’re not responsible—­”

He broke off, and looked round at us.

The Skipper and the two Mates nodded their heads,
in silent assent.

APPENDIX

The Silent Ship

I’m the Third Mate of the Sangier, the
vessel that picked up Jessop, you know; and he’s
asked us to write a short note of what we saw from
our side, and sign it. The Old Man’s set
me on the job, as he says I can put it better than
he can.

Well, it was in the first dog-watch that we came up
with her, the Mortzestus I mean; but it was
in the second dog-watch that it happened. The
Mate and I were on the poop watching her. You
see, we’d signalled her, and she’d not
taken any notice, and that seemed queer, as we couldn’t
have been more than three or four hundred yards off
her port beam, and it was a fine evening; so that
we could almost have had a tea-fight, if they’d
seemed a pleasant crowd. As it was, we called
them a set of sulky swine, and left it at that, though
we still kept our hoist up.